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Charles Hamelin — in so many ways the Big Daddy of Canada’s short-track speed skating clan — had to comfort both.

His 5,000-metre relay brothers will not be defending the gold medal won in Vancouver four years ago. His biological brother, François, committed the irremediable error that plunged the strutting squad into last place in their semifinal Thursday.

His long-time girlfriend Marianne St-Gelais failed to advance out of her 500 m semi, so she required consoling too, though irrepressibly incandescent even in defeat, half-snickering and half-sobbing through a shimmer of tears.

Yet that was the least of his concerns Thursday. On this afternoon, he was the big brother bracing the little brother, the man soothing his woman.

“You win as a team, you lose as a team,” assured Charles. “It’s not one guy or one girl. The team finished fourth. We would never put the blame on Frank’s fall. We’ll leave it as Canada in fourth place.”

Two days earlier, Charles was in a state of bliss, winning the 1,500 that had eluded him in Vancouver and, with the relay team so muscle-flexing in the 5,000, looking all teed up for the record book.

But Hamelin would have needed a medal in all four events subsequent to the 1,500 to pass long-track speed skater Cindy Klassen and speed skater/cyclist Clara Hughes, each with a half-dozen medals in their jewelry chest, to step further up into the pantheon of glitterati.

“It is difficult to get past the disappointment,” said Hamelin, referring to the relay outcome. “But just as I went through high emotion after winning the 1,500 metre, I have to come back from the disappointment.

“Tomorrow we’ll be back on the ice to make sure the focus is not on what we did yesterday or today, but what needs to be done in the next few days.”

Hard sucking this one up, though. The foursome of Charles and Francois Hamelin, Michael Gilday and Olivier Jean was devastated. Most wrenching for François, though, who ran out of chances at a medal in Sochi and ran out of ice in a completely avoidable 23rd lap disaster that his teammates — especially luminary Charles, lungs burning to bridge the gap — could not reverse in what remained of the race.

François — 27, two years younger than Charles — skated right into a track marker, fell, got up and returned to the fray, but far too much time had elapsed and Team Canada couldn’t catch up, despite regaining some ground. They finished last with a time of 6:48.186.

“I stepped on a block,” said François, his eyes pink-rimmed, his voice catching.

The block is a plastic lane marker.

“There was a lot of action in front. People were playing with our track. And I missed ... I didn’t pay attention that much to the track, to the block, and I stepped on the far block completely. The blocks are really hard here. There’s no turning back. If you hit it, you’re going down.”

The ice was unusually soft but François dismissed that as a factor.

“My teammates and all the staff have shown me big support,” he said, still clearly shaken a half-hour later.

Unlike his brother, he won’t have the opportunity to atone in another event. “No, I’m done.”

Gilday, the 27-year-old from Yellowknife, did his best to put on a resilient face. “We had hopes for this relay, obviously, defending champions. We have a strong, amazing history of excellence in the relay and that’s not the way we wanted to end it. We’ll come back next Friday and fight it out for a win in the B-final. We’re Canadians, we’re not going to go out and just settle for nothing.”

Short-track, which often looks and behaves like roller-derby on long, sharp blades, is a calamity-prone sport, of course. On Thursday, calamity struck everywhere — not just with the Canadian men, but against Vancouver silver medallist South Korea and, for a while, against the sprawling Americans.

All three nations, plus Russia, came here gunning for gold in the 5,000 final next week. Yet only the U.S. survived the semis — and only after race referees reviewed video footage and advanced the Americans, disqualifying the Koreans.

The conclusion was that, with five laps remaining in the first semifinal, heavily favoured Korea in the lead — Canada was in the other semi — Ho-Suk Lee interfered with Eduardo Alvarez of the U.S., sending him tumbling into the pads.

“We moved into them, it wasn’t the Americans’ fault,” conceded Korea’s Da Woo Win later. “There was a mix-up in the signs. If we were clear with the signals, then we could have avoided this.”

An obviously relieved Alvarez: “I was really nervous because you just never know how the calls are going to go.”

So it will be the U.S., China, Russia, the Netherlands and Kazakhstan — those last two narrowly avoiding the carnage from the first semifinal — in the upcoming final.

But more stunning is who won’t be there — neither South Korea nor the all-time time dominant Canadian men, a squad that has won three of the last four Olympic gold in the 5,000 m relay, returning here with three of the four team members who triumphed both in Vancouver four years ago and as world champions last year.

It’s short-track — the athletes are ready to skate on bad ice, have strategies to recover for falls. But the Canadians ran out of time.

“We had a plan in place in case somebody fell that we would be able to execute,” explained Gilday. “It was tough to execute that because it was hard to hear our coaches with all the noise, with the Russians being there. I think we did a pretty good job, closing down about half the gap that we had.

“But not enough and end of story.”

Gilday had, at that point, spoken only briefly with François. “He’s crushed, no other way to say. We’re teammates. If I were in his position, the first person I would want to come up and forgive me would be my teammates. I’d want to know they weren’t mad at me. I’m not going to hold it over Frank’s head and I don’t think any of the other teammates will.”

In the 500 m women’s sprint, St-Gelais had been silver in Vancouver but last Thursday with a time of 44.359.

“I was feeling great, honestly, on the ice everything was fine,” she said of her semi. “I was trying to make a move in the race but it wasn’t enough.”

Gold would eventually be claimed in the crazy final by China’s Jianrou Li, essentially skating around the rink by herself following by a three-way collision among all her opponents: Italy, Korea and Great Britain. The Korean, Park, actually stumbled and fell again after getting up the first time. She made it around the oval for a way-back bronze, while Italy’s Arianna Fontana took silver.

In the other event of note, Canada qualified three male skaters through to the quarter-finals in the 1,000 m: Charles Hamelin, Charlie Cournoyer and Olivier Jean. All won their respective heats.

But at the end of a hard-scrabble afternoon, the Canadians were feeling gutted.

Charles in Charge Hamelin will have to pull together the pieces, for ’bro and brothers and lover and country.

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